Abstract: We write this note just a few short weeks after returning from the Women's March on Washington, which took place on January 21, 2017, the day after the inauguration of the current US president. Elisa, Jean, and Leigh Ann Wheeler, a former editor of the Journal of Women's History (JWH), travelled from upstate New York to DC with mixed emotions of anger, trepidation, and defiance in the face of the shifting political landscape. We took some comfort, however, in the "Unity Principles" of the March, which opened with the righteous yet commonsensical proposition that "Women's Rights are Human Rights and Human Rights are Women's Rights." This was followed by a bold affirmation of intersectional feminist politics: "We ... Read More PubDate: 2017-06-08T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: In 1927, Madame Sara Washington, a black beauty columnist for the New York Amsterdam News, wrote an article titled, "Beauty Secrets: Fight Fat." The mere title alerted readers to the incongruous nature of fatness and beauty. In the article, Washington explained that exercise was fundamental to warding off "excess fat" and obtaining a beautiful body. She stated enthusiastically, "There is positively nothing that will aid beauty more than plenty of good exercise in the open."1 With a thriving cosmetics industry in the late 1920s, it may appear unusual that Washington did not recommend make up, hair products, or the latest beauty trends in the market. More curiously, this advice seems atypical as the scholarship on ... Read More PubDate: 2017-06-08T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Lucy Telles, a prolific Miwok-Paiute basket weaver of the Yosemite Valley, posed for a photograph with a baby in a cradleboard in 1926. The image appeared in a promotional article for the Indian Field Days at Yosemite National Park, a biennial event between 1916 and 1929 (Figure 1). In the picture, both Telles and the baby stare directly at the camera with seemingly wary expressions, suggesting both the context for the image and the photograph itself were sites of tension. The photograph's caption further elucidates this friction: "Heap Big Papoose," it reads, "An Indian baby show was one of the features of a recent celebration in Yosemite Valley and this little fellow, all boarded up with no place to go, was one ... Read More PubDate: 2017-06-08T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: In July 1902, Victor Gage Kimbert, a reporter from The Sunday Herald, the weekly Syracuse, New York, newspaper, wrote a lengthy profile of Eliza Pierce, an energetic Native American grandmother in her early sixties. She had formed a chapter of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) with the aid of several generations of younger relatives. Although membership never exceeded a few dozen, her chapter had tripled in size since she founded it in 1901.1 That same year, New York State had over 800 WCTU chapters or "unions" with over 22,000 members.2 Although Eliza's chapter was only a drop in the temperance bucket, the organization piqued the interest of the local reporter whose headline read, "The Only Indian ... Read More PubDate: 2017-06-08T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Historians have recently begun to explain the unique and complex role that sympathetic white southern women played in the public school desegregation battles of the 1950s and 1960s. Reviving a pattern of female progressive activism already familiar in the South, southern white women were often prominent leaders of so-called open schools groups—civic organizations that aimed to thwart "massive resistance" or the varied tactics of southern segregationists who opposed court-ordered racial desegregation of public schools.1 Massive resistance inflamed tensions, often led to violence, and steered some states to threaten abolition of public schools entirely so as to avoid racially integrating them. Open schools groups ... Read More PubDate: 2017-06-08T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Cornelia Christian's wedding was set for June 11, 1856; she lost her nerve around the first of May. In a letter to her fiancé, Walter Lenoir, she confessed her reluctance to leave her family in Staunton, Virginia and relocate to Walter's home in North Carolina.1 Walter wrote back to assure her that he sympathized with her as she prepared to relinquish "all those kind friends and dear relations, the familiar scenes, the sweet home, the old church, the countless cherished associations, all to be mine, for my sake," and promised that his love would measure up to theirs. He would love her, he said, "better than a brother."2 Before Cornelia could answer him, however, she found comfort elsewhere. In a second letter, she ... Read More PubDate: 2017-06-08T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: In 1880, the heiress Maria Longworth Nichols Storer founded Rookwood, an art pottery that trained and employed women, with women workers consistently outnumbering men.1 Both owner and artist, she herself decorated pottery there. Storer also created decorative metalwork between 1897 and 1900.2 Pursuing fine as well as decorative arts, she studied oil painting at the Cincinnati Art Museum's school in 1890 under Frank Duveneck, a prominent painter who emphasized working from a live model, a hallmark of fine arts training. Storer was not only a student in Duveneck's class, she was also its patron. Although male museum trustees rejected Storer's trustee candidacy by barring all women from the position of trustee, Storer ... Read More PubDate: 2017-06-08T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: The four books under review convincingly demonstrate how much the scholarship on beauty culture has moved beyond the narrative of sociopolitical subjugation. The authors explore how women's writings, the women's press, and cosmetics and advertising industries targeted women as consumers and took pleasure in applying cosmetics, how women could use their bodies as tools of self-expression amid changing definitions of femininity in modernity, and how beauty culture stimulated social, economic, and political activism. Although all of the books focus on some aspect of beauty culture, each author asks different historiographical questions about women's bodies, the beauty industry, and political, economic, and social ... Read More PubDate: 2017-06-08T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: As these four monographs ably demonstrate, scholars in the field of US women's history are now accustomed to taking conservative activists and their ideas and organizations seriously. All of the authors treat their historical actors with dignity, meaning that as a group, these works serve to normalize conservative female activism within an academic environment that, in the past, neglected such women and their politics. And yet, certain problems of definition, analysis, and methodology remain: How permeable are the borders between progressivism and conservatism, and between moderation and extremism? And how do these relationships change over time? How should scholars who self-identify as feminists and progressives ... Read More PubDate: 2017-06-08T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: This collection of works on the history of nursing attests to the breadth of interest in the subject as well as its larger significance for the histories of gender, women, race, militaries, wars, and struggles for equal rights. As the centenary of World War I rekindles public interest in the war's nurses, and perhaps nursing in general, these authors point to the way popular images of nurses as romantic heroines obscure a more complex and interesting reality. The authors reveal the nuance of how gender, class, and race shaped the development of nursing as a profession from the mid-nineteenth century forward. At the same time, they argue that gender provided nurses—especially women—with power and respect as they ... Read More PubDate: 2017-06-08T00:00:00-05:00
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